Abstract: The growing use of the electronic health record (EHR) to document clinical care provides new opportunities for other beneficial uses of EHR data. These include biomedical research, quality measurement and improvement, and public health surveillance. In this talk, Dr. William Hersh will provide an overview of the motivations, techniques, and challenges for secondary use of EHR data. He will go into further detail on research in this area, including discussion of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) Medical Records Track, a challenge evaluation that uses a large test collection of de-identified records to identify patients who might be eligible for clinical studies.

Bio: William Hersh is Professor and Chair in the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology in the School of Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland, OR. Dr. Hersh is an innovator and leader in the field of biomedical and health informatics. He received his BS in Biology from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana in 1980 and his MD from University of Illinois Chicago in 1984. After completing residency training in internal medicine at University of Illinois Hospital in 1987, he completed a Fellowship in Medical Informatics at Harvard University in 1990. He then joined the faculty of the OHSU School of Medicine, where he rose through the ranks to Professor and became the inaugural Chair of the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology that was launched in 2003.

Dr. Hersh is known for his research in several areas. His earliest and still most productive area has been information retrieval (IR), where he has authored over 125 peer-review scientific papers as well as published the book, Information Retrieval: A Health & Biomedical Perspective, which is now in its third edition published by Springer. Dr. Hersh has also played leadership roles in several large IR challenge evaluations, including the TREC Genomics Track, the ImageCLEF Medical Image Retrieval Task, and the TREC Medical Records Track.

Another area of research that Dr. Hersh has pursued is informatics workforce development. This derived from his work in developing educational programs in the field at OHSU, and has helped secure federal funding to increase the workforce as well as establish clinical informatics as a new medical subspecialty approved by the American Board of Medical Specialties. Dr. Hersh is also active in clinical research informatics, providing various leadership roles in informatics in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical & Translational Research Award (CTSA) Program.

Dr. Hersh is also known for his innovation and leadership in biomedical and health informatics education. He directs the OHSU Graduate Program in Biomedical Informatics, which is one of the largest in the country. The program trains future researchers through its PhD and postdoc master’s program as well as future practitioners through its master’s and certificate programs. He spearheaded the delivery of the latter programs via distance learning. Dr. Hersh also partnered with the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) to launch the 10×10 (“ten by ten”) program, which has provided a detailed introduction to informatics for over 1200 health care and other professionals.

Dr. Hersh is also providing leadership in two projects related to developing and expanding the health information technology (HIT) workforce to achieve “meaningful use” of electronic health records under the stimulus bill. One project funds 148 students in the OHSU program over three years, while the other develops curricula for community college programs for shorter-term programs. The latter has resulted in a national HIT curriculum that is available to all educators and not just community colleges.

Dr. Hersh has won numerous awards for his innovations. Most prominent among these are the OHSU Faculty Senate Distinguished Faculty Award for his educational accomplishments in 2007 and the AMIA Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics in 2008. Dr. Hersh has also been named to the Modern Healthcare Top 25 Clinical Informaticists in 2010 and 2011.